Synthesized Voices

Synthesized Voices is a record by the American composer Charles Dodge, who is known for his important early contributions to computer music. The record, a compilation of three pieces that came out of Dodge’s ground-breaking experiments with computerized voice synthesis, is recognized as one of his key works.

Dodge had first become interested in computers as musical tools during his undergraduate studies in composition at the University of Iowa in the mid-1960s, a time when modular synthesizers and other analogue electronic instruments where much more widely used. His involvement in the field deepened at Columbia University, where he completed his MA and PhD and was appointed assistant professor of music in 1970.

Dodge produced the three pieces on this record while at Columbia. He composed the pieces himself, using computer systems to synthesize speech and other sounds. Talking about the project decades later, he described it as “making music out of the nature of speech itself.”

 The seven-minute, ten-second track Speech Songs was completed first, in 1973. Dodge started working on it in 1972 after receiving access to newly developed computer software for speech research at Bell Labs in New Jersey. He visited the lab after hours, learning to use the system to synthesize speech with the help of its designer, a researcher called Joseph Oliver. “Its limitations were severe and its musical use a great (and often rewarding) challenge,” Dodge wrote of the system in a note printed on the record jacket. The songs are based on four surrealistic poems by the poet Mark Strand.

The other two tracks, The Story of Our Lives and In Celebration, were completed in 1974 and 1975 respectively. Both were produced at Columbia University’s Center for Computing Activities and Nevis Laboratories, with a system explicitly designed for the synthesis of musical voices. At the time this entailed digitally recording and analyzing human speech, the characteristics (pitch, speed, etc.) of which could then be altered and synthesized.

 The Story of Our Lives is an 18-minute, 15-second track summarized in Dodge’s notes as “an operatic dialogue for male and female synthetic voices.” It tells the story of a couple reading a book about their lives and fantasizing about alternative paths they could have taken. In Celebration, an 8-minute, 25-second track, is described as “an attempt to capture the spirit and structure” of a Mark Strand poem of the same name. The LP, accompanied by the lyrics of the poems, was released by Composers Recordings, Inc. in New York.